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“Coziness was a Creative North Star”: Andrew Ahn on The Wedding Banquet
Joan Chen in The Wedding Banquet In approaching The Wedding Banquet, director Andrew Ahn knew his reimagining of the 1993 romantic comedy directed by Ang Lee had to navigate nuances of queer and cultural identity that he still wrestles with today. So, in updating the original story—about a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant who tries to convince his traditionally-minded parents that he’s straight—Ahn chose to expand it, focusing on a foursome of queer friends who live together in Seattle and become unlikely co-conspirators in a similarly elaborate ruse. Involving not one but two same-sex couples navigating milestone moments, this version of the story (in theaters April 18) goes beyond since-legalized gay marriage to contemplate queer family frameworks and the complex nature of belonging in queer communities of color.
Faced with a looming student-visa expiry, Min (Han Gi-chan) wants to propose to Chris (Bowen Yang), his boyfriend of five years, and stay in the United States, but his wealthy Korean family, expectant he’ll join his grandfather’s company or return home, would cut him off financially if he came out to them. Meanwhile, Lee (Lily Gladstone) wants to start a family with her partner Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), but IVF costs pose a major financial burden.
To make matters more complicated, both Chris and Angela—still stuck at the thirtysomething stage of figuring themselves out—are terrified of taking their relationships to the next level, and Angela is also struggling to resolve resentments toward her mother May (Joan Chen). At a shared crossroads between queer identity, cultural tradition and familial expectation, the quartet decide on an unconventional way forward. Min and Angela will pose as a couple and obtain a green-card marriage, allowing Min to stay in Seattle without coming out to his Korean family; in exchange, Min will pay for Angela and Lee’s IVF expenses using his family funds. Once Min’s grandmother, Ja-young (Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung), decides to come visit and plan the ceremony in person, however, this scheme swiftly unravels, leading to additional complications that force the characters to rethink their relationships.
With a script co-written by Ahn and James Schamus (who co-wrote the original with Lee and Neil Peng), The Wedding Banquet furthers the same exploration of cultural identity, queerness and chosen family that’s distinguished all Ahn’s films to date, from feature debut Spa Night—a poignant drama about a closeted Korean-American teenager coming into his sexuality in LA’s spa underworld—to romantic comedy Fire Island, a more jubilant, self-possessed Pride & Prejudice update about five friends vacationing in the titular island’s gay villages. (Driveways, the film he made between them, is similarly gentle and compassionate in its story of an unlikely intergenerational friendship between a young boy and the Korean war veteran next door.)
The Wedding Banquet feels like a full-circle moment for Ahn; his first film to receive a nationwide theatrical release, it finds him updating an iconic queer film from his childhood, and its story carries even deeper personal resonance. More than a decade ago, in writing and directing Dol (First Birthday), his early short about a gay Korean-American man who goes to his baby nephew’s dol, a traditional Korean first-birthday celebration, Ahn cast his own parents—who did not know during filming that their son was gay, nor that the film explored queer themes.
Making Dol, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, involved deceiving his own family members but then allowed him to come out to them as gay. It was a transformative and emotional experience Ahn managed to build on while making The Wedding Banquet—which premiered at Sundance this year—by bringing his parents to set for the filming of a Korean wedding sequence. With them stationed at video village along with producers, Ahn set about staging a traditional Korean marriage ceremony, complete with handmade hanboks and ceremonial chicken dolls.
“I’ve spent much of my adulthood coming to terms with how my queer identity would preclude me from participating in these types of Korean rituals, rituals celebrating family, rituals that bring you closer to family,” Ahn told Filmmaker ahead of Sundance. “By writing and directing this film, I was able to reconcile my queer and Korean identities. With my cast and crew, my friends and family, I got to have a Korean wedding.”
Before the film’s nationwide theatrical release on April 18, Ahn discussed his path to reimagining The Wedding Banquet, embracing the chaos of queer love, and his enduring friendship and collaboration with cinematographer Ki Jin Kim.
Filmmaker: We last spoke two years ago, when you were in Chicago for a special screening of Fire Island, before its wider release on Hulu. How are you today?
Andrew Ahn: Life’s been good. The movie’s kept me very busy, and it has brought up a lot of questions about the sustainability of what I do and, if I want to have a family, how I’ll balance that—it’s meta. But I’m proud of the film, want to get it out there in a positive way, and it’s my first time having a proper theatrical release, so that feels exciting but also nerve-wracking. I just want to do as much as I can to promote it and let people know about it.
Filmmaker: I’ve read that you first watched Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet with your parents after your mother rented it from your local video store, though she wasn’t at the time aware of its queer themes.
Ahn: Yeah. [laughs] My mom rented the film from the video rental store, not knowing that it was a queer movie. Her interest in it was that it involved Asian people—specifically, that it was a story about Asian people that white people were watching. I do think there was an awkward type of tension, how we committed to finishing the movie. [laughs]
My parents are—generally, for their generation—progressive people, although there are still stereotypes, and there’s still a type of unknowing about queer people and queer life. I remember, years after that, watching Brokeback Mountain with my parents. It was again my mother’s idea, and she asked me, “Did Jake Gyllenhaal die because of AIDS?” You know, because that was the stereotype of how queer people die.
We didn’t really talk about The Wedding Banquet after watching it. We just went our own ways. [laughs] But, as an eight-year-old, it’s wild that I remember that viewing experience so intensely. Subconsciously, I knew how much it meant to me, and the fact that it was the first gay film that I ever saw—and that it was gay and Asian—did set the bar really high. I can’t help but think that it helped me form some early foundational feelings about how culture, sexuality and family are all tied together. So, it’s incredibly meaningful and feels full-circle.
Filmmaker: How did you come together with James Schamus, who co-wrote and produced the original, to work on the script? I understand that Kindred Spirit’s Anita Gou had been talking with Taiwan’s Central Motion Picture Corporation about revisiting films from their back catalog, which included The Wedding Banquet.
Ahn: Kindred Spirit approached James Schamus and [Symbolic Exchange Head of Production] Joe Pirro first, wanting to get a sense of James’ feelings about remaking The Wedding Banquet. James and Ang were initially a little hesitant, but they also understood that, with the right filmmaker, it could maybe feel special. I think that any artist understands how much we owe to artists and the work that came before us, and it’s our hope that our own work can then become the inspiration for the next generation of artists.
Because James, Joe, and I had worked on Driveways together, James had suggested that I chat with Anita, so we met at Sundance in 2019 and had our first conversation. I was initially also hesitant, because I love and respect the original film, but as I was going home that night, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much has changed for the queer community—one of those things being that, now, we can get gay-married. Why would you have a fake straight wedding? I realized there are a lot of reasons why a gay couple might not want to get married: the burden of choice, the expectation, the potential of ruining something that’s already really great. That was something that was happening in my own life, in conversations with my boyfriend. I was thinking about the original film; they accidentally have this baby but what if we showed a couple wanting to have a baby, planning to have a baby, and how that’s such a roller-coaster? I was reminded of a conversation that I had with my boyfriend, our very first about having children, and he said to me, “Well, if it happens, it happens,” which is a line in the film.
Filmmaker: “Not for queer people.”
Ahn: Right. In that moment I realized how incredibly intentional queer people have to be. Any sort of hesitation around having children can become a giant obstacle. And queer people are such wonderful caretakers of each other, it just makes me sad to think that we might not get that opportunity. So, I had these things going on in my life that really dovetailed with the thematics of the film.
I worked with James to ground those in this screwball comedy, which is such a feat of engineering. You have so many characters and plotlines, and James is so incredible with structure. I loved our collaboration, because I think he was very aware of him being the ally. It’s a little bit of a joke that May, Joan Chen’s character, wins an ally award at a nonprofit gala, because James Schamus actually has an ally award named after him. There’s the James Schamus Ally Award at Outfest. [laughs] I think James always understood his role in this, and I was excited to learn from him, through that continued legacy from the original film. It was a very fulfilling experience.
Filmmaker: To ask further about that mother-daughter relationship between May and Angela: you capture this very specific, fraught dynamic that wasn’t present in the original film. Publicly, May is so allied to queer community causes, but privately her relationship with her own daughter is strained and out of alignment with the acceptance she claims to stand for.
Ahn: It’s maybe a very niche and modern topic, but I was really interested in performative allyship. I didn’t want to show another disapproving Asian mother of a queer child. We’ve seen that before and, in many ways, I find the love that’s very clear between these two characters is what makes it so complicated. If May was a homophobic asshole, it would be so easy for Angela to cut her off, but because there’s actually so much care, it makes it harder, because then you know you have to do the hard work at some point to repair it, to find that way to have it feel functional.
So much of what’s at play in the intergenerational storylines of the film is that these are matriarchs who love their children and grandchildren, but they have different priorities—their own—in mind. Through the story, they understand their children’s priorities, and I think that sort of witnessing and selflessness is incredibly hard. To not be selfish is really difficult. Sometimes, people think they’re being allies, or think they’re understanding, and actually they’re not. I wanted to articulate that difficulty and show that true understanding is a continual, lifelong process. It takes a lot of focused effort, and I think that effort is really worth it.
Filmmaker: I see fluidity as a throughline in your films: in the merging of identities that your characters embody, the way different sides of them emerge in different environments, the surprising directions relationships develop in. The Wedding Banquet also depicts fluidity as an earnest messiness for its central four characters, none of whom have themselves completely figured out despite being challenged to make choices about who they are and where they will exist within this larger framework of family and tradition.
Ahn: This is a film about chosen family, and I knew I wanted this ensemble to feel messy. I wanted the dynamics to fuck with each other, the relationships to be human and complicated. I really wanted to embrace that. And I appreciate you telling me that you see this fluidity in all my work. I do think, sometimes, my instinct is to keep things very straightforward, and I love being able to stand on something concrete. I think I’ve practiced a lot of restraint in other projects, most specifically Spa Night. On this one, I really wanted to embrace the chaos, because it’s part of the genre of screwball comedy, and I think I’ve gotten messier in my life as I’ve gotten older as well. [laughs]
I wanted to reflect that in these characters. It’s a film about growing pains, and I know that’s very often applied to an individual, but I wanted to show familial growing pains as well. In order for this family to grow, it had to get painful, but that pain is not necessarily bad. It’s not that we don’t belong together; it’s just we have to reconfigure, because we’re making room for more.
I was really interested in kinds of intimacy and codependency. I remember talking to Kelly and Bowen, and I was like, “You two have an unhealthy friendship.” [laughs] It was just the way it was, and that unhealthy friendship leads to them having sex, to this intimacy that was not expected. There was so much fun to be had in letting these characters live in that chaos so that, by the end of the film, when you see Angela so at peace, even with babies crying in the middle of the night, you would feel this sense of growth and contentment that I hope for in my life.
Filmmaker: You have a very long-standing relationship with your DP, Ki Jin Kim, who shot your short films Andy and Dol (First Birthday), even before Spa Night and Driveways. Tell me about reuniting on this project and what you had in mind in terms of lighting and camerawork.
Ahn: Ki Jin and I have worked together for so long. He’s my closest creative collaborator and one of my best friends. I was his best man at his wedding. Actually, his Korean wedding was a big inspiration for us in this movie; we used his wedding video as a reference and showed it to the entire cast and crew.
Throughout our collaborations, we’re just so interested in a sense of honesty and to not throw visual gimmicks into our filmmaking. That level of restraint is difficult, but we just wanted to be so sensitive to these human beings in the film. Something that we talked a lot about was Ozu, actually, and wanting to create these portraits of our people through medium close-ups. We employed that a few times in the film; in one of my favorite moments, Joan Chen and Youn Yuh-jung are having dinner. There’s an incredible simplicity to their close-ups, but I think that’s what gives them power. We do that again, between Bowen Yang and Youn Yuh-jung, when they talk about his family, and then—very meaningful to me—in the scene between Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran, Lee and Angela, in the garden. They can just see each other, and there’s something about the separation of them that then allows, when they do come together in the frame, to have that feel so cathartic.
There was so much that we wanted to pare back. We talked about Perfect Days, actually; we shot on the same camera as Perfect Days, [the Sony CineAlta VENICE Camera, with Canon K35 and FD Lenses,] and both Ki Jin and I really love that movie. Again, it’s this question of witnessing. It felt like the right aesthetic, the right philosophy, and I wanted the camerawork to feel as human and as heart-on-its-sleeve as the characters in the film. We decided to use a lot of handheld; there are certain errors in it, with the shake, but we decided that’s all okay—that, actually, we like that and want that.
Filmmaker: There’s an intimacy to it, connected to the characters’ relationships to environment. You’re often filming characters in their domestic spaces, surrounded by their familiar comforts; in one of the funniest scenes, the characters have to rush to “de-queer” their living spaces ahead of Ja-young’s arrival. Tell me about working with production designer Charlotte Royer and other creative collaborators to create this atmosphere of queer domesticity.
Ahn: All the department heads from Driveways came back for The Wedding Banquet: Matthew Simonelli for costuming, Charlotte Royer for production design, Ki Jin Kim for cinematography. I just wanted this film to be so vulnerable, and I knew that we could do that together. Charlotte is queer, and she’s so tender and such a character-driven production designer. She’s one of those production designers that will design and dress the insides of drawers, because it helps her understand the insides of these characters, and then that will externalize. It does put a lot of extra work on her, but it’s part of her process.
I wanted the home to be a character, and I wanted this question of stewardship, of building a home for the next generation, to always be at play. Part of stewardship is, outside of the garden and literal nourishment, also culture and heritage. Charlotte worked with Lily to find art from Indigenous artists; Charlotte had previously worked with Lily on Fancy Dance, so there was already a rapport there. There was so much collaboration with our actors, to be able to make this feel like a home for them: what felt comfortable, what felt cozy. Coziness was a creative north star for us. I wanted an audience to watch the film and just think, “Oh, a baby would feel good there. A baby would be great there.”
In how we lensed it, I think there’s a general trend of close-ups that let the background just dissolve into pattern, but Ki Jin was very intentional about really seeing the world that these characters exist in. There are some scenes of Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran sharing a little snack on a couch, and there are no singles in that. That scene is covered entirely in two-shots; it’s a wider two-shot, a medium two-shot and a closer two-shot. We just wanted to see them together and in that space, because this is their home. We really took the space seriously, in understanding how to visualize the movie.
“The Wedding Banquet” opens in theaters nationwide on April 18, via Bleecker Street.
